


Three Short Works

by JoAsakura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23890783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: From prompts I collected the other night on twitter.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	Three Short Works

**ONE**

Gabriel thinks 76 is going to be the first one whining how much he misses home as they find their bunks. 

Fort Nowhere is in the middle of literally that, and the facility is all off-green linoleum and bad fluorescent lighting. The last time it was used regularly was probably the Cold War.

76\. He's not going to bother learning the guy's name. 76 has soft blue eyes and a soft mouth and Gabriel doesn't care what that crappy ranger tat on his arm implies, that kind of cornfed white boy nonsense is the first to fold in a crisis.

He keeps telling himself this, even as he finds himself sitting in the "calm room" watching a video wall of the ocean, reminding himself of what the pacific smells like, of what LA in the summer smells like. Street corn. He misses goddamn street corn.

The only corn in this place is some pallid, gelid creamed variety.

And Jack Morrison.

He didn't mean to learn 76's name. But that cornflake-box captain America knockoff caught him off guard after hard run on the track, that smile in a sweaty flushed face had disarmed him completely. "Nice run, devil dog," he'd laughed, dumping water on his head. The high ceiling was painted a wan, faded blue that fooled no one, but the water glittered in that golden hair like diamonds. "You got a name, man?"

"24" he said at first. Then: "Reyes." Gabriel grunted. "Gabriel."

"Cool. Jack. Jack Morrison." That goddamn smile like a pulse cannon straight into Gabriel's guts.

He's lost track of the days he's come into the calm room, watching the shitty loop video of the ocean. They're down almost 20% of the initial 99 subjects. Injections come on the regular, followed by days of baseline reassessment, followed by more injections. Jack sits with him some days and watches the ocean. Sometimes, they watch video of cornfields, vast whispering oceans of green and gold. 

Even though Gabriel knows that the ocean is insanely deep and full of things humanity still doesn't entirely understand, the corn is more frightening. It feels like monsters live in those unchanging, monoculture fields.

Time doesn't have any qualitative meaning for him at the moment, but he's aware that this is one of the times that Jack *should* be in here, eating jello and fever-sweating next to Gabriel on the couch as they watch the ocean. But he's not.

By the time that thought raises it's muzzy head, there's screaming from the cafeteria.

Gabriel's reflexes are a hundred times faster than they were before and it still feels too slow as he sees Jack, soft blue eyes all black with pupil and teeth bared in a feral howl, going after one of the doctors.

They're all screaming at him. At _76_. To stop.

"JACK!" Gabriel's hoarse voice breaks the chaos, the moment before he puts himself in between Morrison and the doctor. The smell of piss is rank in the fluttering, sickly light. Jack comes back to himself with a blink, chest heaving. His fever is off the charts and he's trembling as he sags against Gabriel.

Monsters live in the corn, but he knows the name of at least one of them.

And Gabriel promises himself, as he steers Jack away from the needles and the security, that he's going to take him home someday.

**TWO**

One of the side effects of the experimental treatments that produced the war-winning supersoldiers, was that they had no idea what the _long-term_ side effects were actually going to be.

Ana wished every day that the American government had done a little bit more research before just willy-nilly shoving nanomachines and retroviral upgrades into a bunch of willing idiots. To wit:

"Can you please, for the love of god, chew less .. vigorously?" Jack peered over his newspaper. There was a bruise on his throat roughly the size and shape of Gabriel's mouth and his shirt was inside out. "Your jaw. It's doing this. This thing."

Gabriel shoved an entire piece of toast in his mouth and chewed very slowly. Whatever Jack was hearing, Ana certainly couldn't. But Gabriel was staring at him. "Sunscreen," he growled around the toast. He was wearing a beanie and a hoodie and it was the middle of summer.

Jack's eyes narrowed. "What."

"You're going to have a melanoma on that stupid face of yours by the time you're 50 if you don't wear sunscreen regularly. Not gonna look that great on a statue with skin cancer." Gabriel shoved another piece of toast in his mouth.

"When you're angry, you smell like a slightly greasy rodent, you know that?" Jack hissed back.

"I'm not angry, Jackie, _I'm concerned_. For your _health_." He chewed very, VERY deliberately, and Ana watched a tiny tic surface at the corner of one of Jack's eyes.

"Like you were concerned earlier, when you told me you found my slightly misaligned pinky toe bones were unappealing sexually?"

"Bones are important. They're the... the... " Gabriel paused, realizing that no matter what he said next, it would sound ridiculous. Jack lifted one eyebrow and Ana found herself wishing she could drown herself in a teacup. "Bones. Of the Body. And I can feel your toes when you touch me with your cold feet."

"I can't help that I have a naturally low body temperature, Gabriel."

"I can't help that I'm VERY TEMPERATURE SENSITIVE!"

Ana set the cup down hard enough that both of them jumped towards each other. "Is this some mid life supersoldier crisis the two of you are having? Because I will kill you both, right now, with a butter knife if I have to."

Jack and Gabriel exchanged a sheepish look. "We occasionally still get some random physiological changes happening." Gabriel muttered.

"Angela's written three very critical papers about it." Jack added, then he peered over at Gabriel. "Do you. Want to continue this back in quarters. We don't want to..."

"We don't want to disturb Captain Amari with her morning routine," Gabriel finished. "I still have to take a shower anyways."

"Did you know there's a rodent or something in Australia that mates so hard it basically explodes?" Jack said in a tone Ana wished she didn't know he could do.

"You're going to need to tell me more. About rodents."

"GET LOST BOTH OF YOU!" Ana yelled.

She couldn't wait until whatever this second puberty shit the two of them were undergoing passed.

**THREE**

In another life, Jack Morrison pulls himself out of the wreckage of Geneva in relatively intact condition. Not in this one, though. In this one, he's a mess of meat and surplus biotech. 

He's grateful for the winter, at least, when he can bundle in heavy clothes and hide the awkward shape of his new arms and legs. It's harder to pass unseen, trying to track the thread that might lead him back to Gabriel, when he's so...

 _obvious_.

He's followed a breadcrumb to a Vishkar office in New York and he regrets it now. He's got a rack of tactical enhancements making up the deficit for a chunk of his damaged brain, and there are too many people making too much noise. Everything is triggering a threat warning.

And there's a Santa. Santas. Plural. One of those seedy, red-coated motherfuckers on every block. (Reinhardt loved playing Santa at overwatch holiday parties, laughing uproariously as he handed out presents. None of these are Reinhardt. _Every one of them_ is triggering a threat warning.)

It's the bells. The pattern of the bells is just out of rhythm and he remembers gunfire, shells exploding against omnic skin a hundred lifetimes ago. Too much noise. Too many heat signatures.

There's one in front of Vishkar. Clanging clanging _CLANGING_ that goddamned bell.

He doesn't know what he's looking for here, and he can't think. God, New York was a mistake. He should have just let the omnics just take Manhattan.

Theres movement inside the sea of movement, fluid dynamics in a pattern of human steps. 

_Gabriel_. 

He doesn't know if Gabe knows he's here. Doesn't know if Gabriel even _knows_ , even _cares_ if he's alive. But that heat signature, curling through the crowd like steam off a subway grate, is what's driven him across three continents in a chassis of flesh and junk cybernetics.

Jack lurches off the hood of the parked cab he's been sitting on, hard enough to lurch the car, and heads for that coiling shape.

_Gabe, Gabe, wait for me._

And there is a Santa in front of him then, bell clanging as he insists of a fraction of Jack's attention.

Jack shoves him aside with a fraction of his strength, running towards the heat signature. And then.

And then.

Nothing. There's no trace of Gabriel's nanomachine fog. No ambient heat trail.

A malfunction, reading the wake of too many bodies moving too close too fast.

The bell clangs one more time and Jack crumples it like tinfoil.

_Wait for me._


End file.
